Thursday, November 26, 2015

Syria crisis has Pentagon's sock puppet software working overtime

by Wayne Madsen

The U.S. Defense Department's and the U.S. Cyber Command's offensive information warfare operations to program "sock puppet" software to post U.S. propaganda messages on social media and web page comment sites has been working overtime since Turkey's downing of a Russian war plane in contested Syrian-Turkish airspace.

In 2013, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is based in Tampa, issued a contract to California-based Ntrepid Corporation for an "online persona management program" that would permit a single military member to operate 10 separate online identities in cyberspace. The operation is code named "Operation Earnest Voice" and its area of coverage includes the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq. Through a procedure known as "traffic mixing," military personnel would blend their Internet personae with users in other U.S. military commands and government agencies, including U.S. Cyber Command and the Central Intelligence Agency, to maintain "powerful deniability." Other classified U.S. contracts support sock puppets acting as Wikipedia editors to alter the online encyclopedia's entries to keep in line with U.S. propaganda and disinformation aims.

online persona management service" that will allow one U.S. serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world. - See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/revealed-sock-puppet-software-allows-us-military-creat-fake-online-identities#sthash.Wwu1p52L.dpuf

An example of an anti-Russian sock puppet program in action was recently discovered on the George Soros- and Democratic Third Way-influenced social media website, Democratic Underground (DU), which is often quoted by Soros acolyte Thom Hartmann. Interestingly, Hartmann also continues to broadcast from the studios of RT in Washington, which makes the following use of a sock puppet program all the more interesting.

On November 25, a DU user with the handle of "dantana21" posted a video of RT's CrossTalk program, which featured three guests agreeing that Turkey's shootdown of a Russian Sukhoi-24 fighter bomber was a senseless provocation. A sock puppet program using the handle "uhnope," and which has been wall papering the DU site with non-stop anti-Russia propaganda for well over a year, experienced a glitch and, after launching into a predictable attack on RT, went into a happy Thanksgiving mode.

The "uhnope" sock puppet came back and posted the same message using the handle "uppityperson." Both sock puppets also asked the RT video poster how his girls were doing. "Dantana21," aware that these posts were sock puppets, replied that he had no girls.

Rather than delete the "uhnope" and "uppityperson" sock puppet personae, DU, which is primarily used by gay and lesbian single-issue activists and Israel supporters to push their agendas, deleted the user dantana 21 and the RT video. RT has been informed on numerous occasions that its host Hartmann has close ties to Soros web operations like DU and DailyKos, however, the Moscow-based management of the network has chosen to ignore these repeated warnings to its own detriment.

Hartmann's past employment includes a stint at Radio Free Europe in Berlin at a time when the network was funded totally by the CIA. His expertise is in neuro-linguistics.

It is noteworthy that DU has banned any excerpts from or links to WMR articles.